Please review the initial goals and information for My Diabetes Meals project in the "Idea to Prototype in 30 Days" challenge. Also it would be helpful feedback if you could take the poll located on that page.

I am a novice designer, but I appreciate how important that is for good iOS applications. I have been trying to build my skills in this area to enhance my development projects.

I hope to learn more about design, especially tools and workflow with sketches, wireframes, mockups, and prototypes that help define and shape my applications.

I currently have many tools such as Marvel, Invision Freehand, Sketch, Figma, Framer, etc., but I'm not really sure how to use them. For example, where do I start? Which tools help the most (and when)?

How should I use design tools along with my Xcode development environment with Interface Builder storyboards and Swift code for iOS (and macOS) applications? Or JetBrains tools like WebStorm for web applications?

My favorite emoji would be - a great fasting blood glucose target waking up in the morning.

This provides background about my users, their problems, current environment, and potential solutions.

App

Name: My Diabetes Meals (by: Doug Warren)

Purpose: Provide healthy meal plans and recipes for people with diabetes, and understand their glucose impact.

Goals:

Track, analyze, and plan meals

Manage recipes, photos, and links

Understand diabetes impact

Background

First it’s helpful to focus on the people who will use my new app, along with related observations about them. This enables me to understand the current market, segment my target audience, and identify problems that can be solved using my app. This ensures that people will use what I create to improve their lives through better diabetes self-care that leverages digital health technologies.

In the spirit of an agile design approach, I will create basic documentation initially based on my personal experience, and then refine and enhance it later as necessary. Feedback will be solicited from designers and potential users to help validate and extend this information.

This process has been extremely valuable, and I am glad that I spent the time doing this before designing my prototype. It has enabled me to really focus on my user’s experience, their problems, and my opportunities.

These are documented as updates 3-6 for my project, but it seemed useful to create a topic here in the Makerspace forum since it appears that is where everybody looks now.

What's the best way to create wireframes with prototyping for an iOS app? I've been exploring Marvel and Sketch somewhat for my project.

My initial impression is that Marvel seems to be easier to use and more appropriate for early wireframes and prototypes. However, Sketch would then be the preferred tool as these designs are extended toward high-fidelity design, mockups, and prototypes. It's also nice that they both work together quite nicely with syncing.

I would like to understand more about recommended workflow, best practices, and related articles that might be helpful. It's still not clear how to move between these design tools and the Xcode development environment with Interface Builder storyboards and Swift code.

I'm interested in experiences and suggestions from other designers and developers. I plan to share my initial prototypes shortly to get some feedback.

@Graeme Thanks for checking my initial attempt to create these design documents. This was the first I tried to do this, and it was quite a struggle. However it was a very helpful exercise, and I am learning a lot that will help me create better prototypes of my app.

In my User Person document, I identified the following possible user personas to represent different types of users for my app.

Initially I worked on a user persona for Doug (me), and will now expand to additional generic types as personas for various market segments as design and development proceeds to address with the new tools you suggested.

@Graeme Great! Another wonderful tool. It's very easy to create quick personas, and I will give it a try to create several additional personas based on the user types that I identified in the User Persona document (not me).

@Graeme This looks fantastic! I'm exploring it now, and it seems to cover a lot and is easy to use. It would also enable sharing, collaboration, and feedback too. I might try using it with my current empathy map, user persona, and journey map to see how they look in this tool. Then I might try other target users other than myself. Thanks for sharing this.

@Graeme These seem slightly useful for me, but user story mapping is far more important. Perhaps these might supplement for some perspective regarding benefits and value vs effort, but probably only after user story mapping. I'm trying to determine what my initial focus for the prototype MVP should be.

@Graeme I found this article on Try Design Thinking + Scrum quite helpful for integrating design with the development lifecycle. It highlights the importance of combining design thinking (empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test) phases with iterative agile Scrum sprint builds (backlog, plan, review, retrospective). It also mentions user story mapping as a useful technique for establishing a feature backlog.